My Seditious Heart by Arundathi Roy

“What I want to write I cannot describe. It is akin to breathing, and the air we breathe has caste, gender, Kashmir, love, animals, trees, and many other things. We can’t write if we are afraid, afraid of intimacy or politics, or of making the background become foreground.”- Arundhati Roy, The Hindu, October 28, 2017

In an increasingly hostile environment where things don’t go well with the critiques of the government and its policies, writing political essays is a way of opening up space for justice rights and freedom believes Arundhati Roy. My Seditious Heart is a collection of political essays which would speak Roy’s journey as both a writer and a citizen, of both India and the world.

The exploitation of religions for political gains, fake news, the global environmental crisis, and others on the same line could cause our extinction. Roy through these essays becomes specific about these problems speaking in the defence of the collective, of the individual and of the land, in the face of the destructive logic of financial, social, religious, military and governmental elites. The writer names it ‘the end of imagination’ which is apt for the collection of non-fiction essays. But these, form a story-universe which was the result of a quest that spun around from the places the writer wandered over the years.